So I’m sitting here watching Born Survivor: Bear Grylls. “Bear” (is that really his name?) is some kind of born explorer who’s essentially a more gung-ho version of Ray Mears, except he’s ex-SAS. In this first episode of a new series he begins by leaping out of a helicopter in just a pair of trousers and shirt, water canteen and knife. He parachutes into some the thick jungle and there my problems with the programme start.
He says he’s just accompanied by a camera crew, but there is evidently more than just a single person following him. There’s a parachuting camerman, and but with cutaways and wide shots it’s evident that the crew is more than a single person. At least two or three camera operators I’d have said as well as sound recordists and so on.
Even with light kit, they’re going to need some help to move around in the humid rainforest with Bear who’s unencumbered. When Bear climbs down a waterfall, one of them is already at the bottom filming him, while he’s also be shot from above. Is there another way around, or are all the camera crew also ex-SAS? We see Bear paddling a canoe. Yet the crew obviously also have a boat. Did they fashion theirs too? And when Bear finally comes ashore at some random beach, the camera team have a techno-crane in place to pull up with showing him walk off into the sunset.
Now I don’t doubt that Bear does all the things he says he does – we get to see him puking in shaky nightvision – but we’re all media literate enough to realise that TV is not always quite what it might seem to be.
[UPDATE]
Sam Wollaston in this morning’s Guardian seems to share some of the same thoughts as me:
Bear parachutes out of his helicopter, above the Costa Rican jungle, and apparently gets tangled up high in the canopy of the rainforest. Happily a cameraman has anticipated exactly where Bear is going to come down and is already in place, 60 feet up a neighbouring tree, to film Bear’s arrival. There’s someone else on the forest floor below, to catch Bear abseiling down (wearing a harness that looks quite different to the one he jumped out of the helicopter in). And then does he just leave that parachute up there, with all its strings, for the monkeys? Could it be that the whole arrival thing was just a little bit staged? I think we should be told.